Girls Gone Wild in Weimar Germany: Siegfried Kracauer on Girlkultur and the Un-Kultur of Americanism

This essay explicates Siegfried Kracauer's vehemently critical views on the merging Weimar cultural waves of so-called "Girlkultur" and "Amerikanismus." By way of frenetic media-stoked hyperbole, these two confluent waves took on extravagant, "wild" meanings during the brief phase of relative stabilization in Weimar Germany between 1924 and 1930, when Kracauer was cultural editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung. In his various polymath roles as journalist, novelist-litterateur, architectural expert, philosophically-oriented culture critic, and sociological theorist, Kracauer was well-positioned to follow both the contours of these highly visible surface waves and their deeper undercurrents and subsurface channels. After 1926 he was increasingly swayed by what coalesced into Frankfurt School critical Marxism, which remained sharply critical of the three preeminent ideological positions of the age—centrist liberal-democratic capitalism, radical rightist fascism, and radical leftist Stalinist communism. Each of these major ideological postures was considered by Frankfurt School adherents to be totalitarian in tendency, albeit with discernibly different accents. After 1930, during the Great Depression until the inception of Nazi Germany in 1933, Kracauer continued as cultural editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung in Berlin, working alongside Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin as well as maintaining close contact with Theodor Adorno and Leo Löwenthal, whose various heterodox Marxian views he often echoed, accented with his own singular modulations.²

I propose to show that Kracauer adopted the critical Marxian version of the distanced, ulterior perspective of Besserverstehen or "better-understanding": the claim to understand the Other (here, the shibboleth of the modern Americanized Girl figure in her full systemic gestalt or configural "whole") better than it (or "she-as-it"!) can understand itself. By way of such audacious, ulterior Besserverstehen, the personal "she" of the Girl is recognized, shockingly, as having been totally transformed into an objectivized "it" of rationalized reification. This bold interpretive claim of Besserverstehen trumped the more customary subject-centered and personalist approach of empathic understanding (Verstehen) of "I-Thou," conceived as the re-experiencing or "re-living" of other life, meaning, expression, or lived experience.

The more traditional view of interpretive Verstehen—as empathic re-living or "co-consciousness" with an other—was embodied during the Weimar period in major currents of existential thinking, phenomenology, philosophical anthropology, personalism, and neo-idealist historicism. These contemporary intellectual currents were monitored by Kracauer with the same combination of close involvement (Verstehen) and "extraterritorial" critical detachment (Besserverstehen) that he bestowed on mass popular culture. Indeed, both traditional German high philosophical culture and "Americanized" mass popular culture were, on his reading, reciprocally embroiled in the same dark modern destiny of total pan-rationalization: evolving from different levels, high culture and mass culture were headed toward the same desolate final end; this gloomy convergence was deemed irrevocable, despite Kracauer's own remarkable capacity to use the one level of culture to shed "interim" points of light on the shadow-bound other.³

Although his views shifted somewhat with circumstance and locale, Kracauer never varied in his conviction that human beings of the modern age, starkly typified as homo americanus and even more luridly as The Girl, were becoming far less than—or quite "other" than—fully and genuinely human. For all his textural nuances, his interpretive stance impelled him toward the pitfall of overgeneralized abstractions about totalizing systems and their visible (in-) human types, thereby undercutting his own humane aims and, more tellingly, his own critique of modern rationalizing abstraction as a semiconscious, fateful dead-end for humanity. Kracauer wound up overreaching his own observational framework towards vast—but as yet still veiled—surplus meanings, which he insisted were at once both hyper-rationalized and hyper-mythified. His indictment of Girl-culture and Americanism as advanced forms of pan-rationalization-cum-hyper-mythification converging into the moloch of a totalizing "system" gone amok reflected his own reductive overinterpretation, which in some ways played into the hostile hands of his right-wing and Nazi enemies, as it shared some common grounds of radical ulterior "extraterrritoriality" toward liberal-capitalist, democratic mass modernity. Simply put, Kracauer's systemic and holistic stance...